Salons Make Comeback, Though Not Yet the Talk of Town : Ideas: Gatherings of artists, philosophers and the well-read are scattered throughout the L.A. area, including Long Beach and San Pedro. Some have gone high-tech, with conversations via computers.
It is an idea whose time has come--again.
The salon, a gathering of people thrilled by good talk (good food optional), is making a comeback throughout the country.
In the Los Angeles area, there are about 15 salons in cities such as Long Beach and San Pedro, attracting people committed to discussing something more cosmic than those local conversational staples: real estate and the fate of the Queen Mary.
Ironically, the new salon was born not in Los Angeles, the mother of all trendsetters, but in Minneapolis, the mother of really bad winters. In its March-April, 1991, issue, the Utne Reader ran a special issue on saloning and asked readers if they would like to start sharing the sacrament of good talk with their neighbors.
Eric Utne, founder of the prize-winning magazine, which reprints stories from the alternative press, has been active in salons for years. And the magazine promised to provide to anyone who wrote in the names of like-minded people in nearby ZIP codes.
According to Utne staff member Griff Wigley, the magazine expected a thousand replies. It got 8,200. “We really were surprised to the point we were caught totally unprepared to handle it,” said Wigley, whose official title at the magazine is salon-keeper. It took the journal months to process all the reader replies. Since then, it has installed software to provide electronic support for the popular project.
Wigley said about 250 of the Utne-inspired salons are active nationwide. He also runs the magazine’s electronic salon, whose members communicate by computer, a subspecies of the new salon that writer Gareth Branwyn praises for its “good company, freewheeling conversation and imaginary martinis.”
The idea of bringing movers and shakers together to make astute observations dates back at least to 18th-Century France, where salon-keepers such as Madame de Stael helped make intellectual history. Early in this century, memorable salons were run by Gertrude Stein and Mabel Dodge, whose Greenwich Village Wednesday nights attracted writers, activists and artists, and were also notable for the quality of the Scotch and Gorgonzola.
Today’s local salons are as varied as their members. Tina Tessina, 48, a therapist and author of several self-help books, described herself as “a product of what they call the ‘60s.” Tessina said she joined a Long Beach salon last August because she missed “the coffeehouse culture, where we just sat around and talked philosophy.”
The Long Beach salon, which meets monthly, averages about 10 members and includes people of Asian, Latino and American Indian descent, Tessina said. Discussions have touched gender roles, a best-selling book and the state of health care in the country.
“We pick a topic before each meeting, and it can be pretty much anything,” Tessina said. “There are a lot of widely diverse views. . . . We want to learn from each other. We don’t want to decide who is right or wrong.”
The desire for intelligent discourse is apparently one of the great unrequited needs of contemporary America.
Carleen Brady, an animator who has been going to a salon in Santa Monica, seemed to speak for many of the “saloners” or “salonites”--a preferred term has not yet emerged--when she observed: “You have a little route you carve out to work and back, and you have a little circle of friends whom you really like, and then you realize you’re telling the same jokes over and over again.”
Wigley speculates that the new salons are popular because there is nothing else quite like them in contemporary society. Yes, there are lots of groups. But the vast majority of meetings are devoted to helping people climb the 12 steps to recovery or offering people support in times of crisis. Salons tend to attract people who see themselves not as wounded but as articulate, educated, curious, committed and emotionally healthy, thank you, rather than recovering.
For many members, the salons are a place where they can exercise an active mind and display a supple intellect to advantage. “If you have things to say, and you know you can say them forcefully, amusingly and pointedly, then you’re desperate for a place to do that,” Brady said.
Sometimes, the conversations can be intense. In San Pedro, discussions involve such “devastating issues” that some people were leaving depressed, said Jeanne Melvin, 44, a psychotherapist who hosts the monthly meetings in her Point Fermin home. The meetings now end with everyone sharing “something positive that happened that evening or in the world or in their lives. Something that gives them hope about the future,” Melvin said.
The San Pedro group, which also attracts residents from Bellflower, Carson, Harbor City and Wilmington, has adopted a different format than most salons.
At the beginning of each session, Melvin said San Pedro salon members have five minutes to talk about “whatever is burning in their heart and mind” while holding a piece of gnarled driftwood, which indicates that they should not be interrupted. Called a council, the idea is based on American Indian tradition in which a “talking stick” is used to designate the speaker.
At the last meeting, a woman who had lost several friends to AIDS talked about the effect of the deadly disease on the country; a librarian discussed the impact of new technology on libraries, and an engineer used a computer game to show the complexities of creating and running a city.
“One of the things that works well is that everyone has a special interest,” Melvin said. Barry Tavlin has been part of a Hancock Park salon ever since he was directed to it as a result of a ZIP code error on the Utne Reader’s part.
Tavlin, 42, who lives in Santa Monica and designs software for a living, revels in the mix of members, who include a screenwriter, a psychiatrist, a manager of senior housing and a graduate student. Members range in age from the 20s to late 60s, and the group meets in the office of member Pamela Rogow, who designs museum exhibits.
At one recent bimonthly meeting, the topic was gun control. It had been chosen by a member who had recently been held up at gunpoint “one sunny Monday morning” outside his home in Westwood. That meeting revealed almost universal support for gun control within the group.
But other subjects have revealed the discontinuities in the members’ views, and those have made for livelier meetings. Tavlin especially relished the talk the night the group tackled the issues raised by the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. The women told personal stories of sexual harassment that were a revelation to Tavlin, and a few of the older men had momentary lapses from political correctness. Someone even used the term, girls. “It was kind of wild and woolly,” Tavlin recalled.
Robert Berend, 35, is also a member of the Hancock Park group. An attorney who specializes in estate planning in socially responsible investments, Berend joined, he said, “because I’m intrinsically opinionated and moderately well-read, and I like throwing monkey wrenches into conversations.”
Times staff writer Roxana Kopetman contributed to this story.